I've never cared looked at the creators/talent behind an anime before/while/after watching it.
Only creator/talent recognition I have is when I notice the art or the voice(s) of an anime is the same/similar to that of another anime I've watched before.

Can't say I know much about the animators. I only notice the obvious stuff like voice actors and the directors if they have a particular style, like how Oishi Tatsuya has a thing for inserting real life photos into his works.

I feel like the problem is that the Western otaku fandom is too disconnected from the production side of anime for it to really be meaningful for most. In Japan, these people have countless interviews, events, social media accounts and so forth which help attach a personality to them - but in the West barely any of that is available except as extremely indirect (and often outright wrong) hearsay, and so it is hard to treat them as any more than just random names. With seiyuu, at least, one can hear their voices, which is I expect a large part of why they tend to be better known than other anime staff, whereas it is comparatively easy to ignore the personal vision behind background art and OSTs and the like.

The huge number of people involved in anime production doesn't help either: there's plenty of well-known mangaka, for instance, but when you are a fan of an anime, it is less clear who among the staff it is worth following, and there is so much turnover in the industry that it isn't exactly easy to keep track of them either (doubly so if one doesn't limit themselves to recent releases). Hence why mainstream Western fans tend to latch so much onto studios, rather than individual staff members: there's few enough notable ones that they can be readily learned and followed. Of course, studios are not a particularly useful measure of anything in most cases, and to focus only on them is to smooth over all the individual contributions to the work, but again the minds behind those contributions are so inaccessible to the average viewer that that is barely even perceived as a negative.

>>124171
Reminds of how people often credit Shinbo as the sole director at Shaft.

In my view, all they are doing is animating the work of a mangaka so the staff and studio are not that important. Well clearly they are important but not in a way that I put too much attention too.

>>124171
a lot of production notes are pretty dry so there isn't much incentive to translate it either - they pour and present the majority of their effort and messages into a relatively concise work rather than thoughts that show you how it all came together.

>>124166
>>124171
Completely agree. I read that sometimes the writers are the ones who force fan favorite scenes in productions by begging to the higher ups as a group.
>>124173
I can agree with manga adaptations but from reading interviews with LN authors, they say that lines and scenes don't always translate well to anime because some of them leave expressions up to interpretation and are intentionally ambiguous in their writings to let people read between the lines, same with the faces and intonations characters are supposed to have.

Yeah, I can't say I pay much attention. There's dozens of important named people involved with everything and I really can't find any pattern. There's too many variables, including the source material, so it feels like a major time investment of me spending hundreds of hours to find some sort of pattern. And as someone else said, I'm just a Westerner that can't follow them.
Recently I had no idea Undead Unluck was going to be amazing, I just tried the first episode and thought WHOA and eagerly added it to seasonal stream. Maybe someone with more patience would have been able to see some former Shaft talent there by looking them up on websites, or could have looked at the manga to see if it had great potential, but neither of those guarantee a great anime. But, it solidified David Production as a studio I will very closely follow since I did like that Undead Unluck, Urusei Yatsura 2022 and also their Fire Force adaptation. This is pretty much just agreeing with what others have said in the thread, though.

I guess using websites you could 'favorite' staff members and then you could see which new shows they're involved with, but that does rely on them being updated regularly. How many people would you 'favorite' though before it ends up simply being dozens of shows every season since these people are always switching around?

Nowadays I just know seiyuu. 10+ years ago I would say I generally knew the level of quality to expect from a studio but now there's so much outsourcing and new studio offshoots popping up all the time that I don't feel like studio tells you much anymore.

>>124185
I think for specific studios like Kyoani or Trigger you know what you're getting always in terms of animation. Don't think they outsource much of their important work to others. It seems like with all the isekai creating manufacturing plant studios though that most of the stuff is outsourced and stuff created by them can usually be indistinguishable from other studios. At the very least though you can usually identify good studios that are mostly consistent.

I generally only have an interest in the seiyuu & studios, though I do check the director/series composition roles for a rough indication of how the show may be. I don't put too much weight on the latter though since kuso directors/writers have made great shows & vice versa, there's a lot more factors at play in production than just them.

I've never really cared too much about the more minute roles like animation directors, key animators, etc. I love good animation for sure, but I just don't care too much about which specific person did it since the animation itself typically isn't among the reasons I watch a show. If an excellent key animator on X series also worked on an episode for Y series, I'm not going to pick up Y series just to see it. For those into art/animation like the sakugabooru crowd, though, I can definitely see why they'd want to.

>>124171
It's a bit of a shame how much translated production material and further research is sentenced to Twitter's walled garden. So many people on there that are knowledgeable but publish their knowledge on a kuso platform you can't even view half the time without an account.

>>124317
>So many people on there that are knowledgeable but publish their knowledge on a kuso platform you can't even view half the time without an account
It's ok! In time they'll all be on misskey once Elon's gutted jp twitter enough. Where you can easily sign up and be free of all the limitations westerners force through twitter! As long as you sign up through a JP IP. That isn't a VPN since it could get you banned. And your sign up is through a JP exclusive email because most western ones throw an error including gmail/proton. Which is easy to get as long as you've got a JP phone number with SNS available that you can activate any time, while in Japan.

>>124318
...I signed up to Misskey on my kuso western gmail with my kuso western IP and I didn't have any problems...
Also, you can just sign up to other instances on the Fediverse.

>>124319
Yeah, I did that a year or so ago too but I forgot or my password was changed and I can't get into the account.

I know the basic stuff like big name directors, artists, composers, seiyuus, etc. I also like watching behind the scenes stuff when it's available such as vid related.

>>124348
There's an official version on youtube of the short animation by the way. Give it a watch.